Seniors’ ads on spending get their reaction

It began with several hundred southern Orange County seniors contending their property management company was spending too much money on carwashes, expensive lunches and gifts for its employees. Those residents of Laguna Woods Village, a retirement community of 18,000, formed the group Residents Voice. They went after a bigger audience last month when they bought a series of quarter-page newspaper advertisements to publicize their complaints.

But on Thursday, Residents Voice members learned that the management company had launched an inquiry of its own, asking how the group had funded the advertisements.

Professional Community Management of California released a statement saying the group was causing “strife and contention in the community” by attacking the company and said it would contact the Internal Revenue Service and the state attorney general about Residents Voice’s financial status.

Residents Voice last month bought a three-day run of ads in the Orange County Register that questioned the spending of Professional Community Management, the firm that operates the walled-in retirement village using monthly payments from residents.

The advertisements “raise the question of whether someone or some organization outside the community, possibly with monetary gain as a motive, is assisting in funding these advertisements,” according to PCM’s statement.

Russ Disbro, chief executive of the management company’s California division, said in an interview that “if they are collecting money for the purpose of creating change within the community,” Residents Voice should have to disclose its funding and expenses, just as many other political and nonprofit organizations do.

Pamela Grundke, who heads Residents Voice, said the group paid for the ads using $9,600 in donations collected from residents. She defended the ads as their only recourse since efforts to force their nonprofit board to take a tougher stance on the company had proved ineffective.

“We raised this money in three days,” Grundke said. “Doesn’t that tell you just how upset and angry this community is? We did this because the directors were not listening to us.”

This year residents obtained records of credit card statements and reimbursement reports from the last two years that showed, among other things, charges for $982 at a Claim Jumper restaurant; $811 at Dave & Buster’s, a bar-arcade chain; and $2,500 on See’s Candies, in addition to tens of thousands of dollars spent on birthday and holiday lunches, gift certificates and carwash vouchers.

Concern over the expenses prompted months of raucous meetings in which residents lambasted the retirement community’s board for failing to reign in what they viewed as inappropriate spending.

Professional Community Management has defended the expenses as necessary to motivate and retain its 1,000-member work force.

But the outcry led the community’s board to pass a staff support spending policy in August. Critics said the document only codified the status quo.

Grundke defended Residents Voice as an informal community organization with nothing to hide.

“We don’t have a membership, we have people who attend,” she said. “We exist on donations.”

PCM officials said they were concerned that so much money was being spent to damage the company’s reputation.

“This ad took the discussion beyond the Laguna Woods Village community and out into all of Orange County,” Disbro said. “It seems to be a very large amount of money to get their story out.”

tony.barboza@latimes.com